Preparing for back to school, Amazon.com launched it Kindle Textbook Rental service that allows students rent textbooks from the Kindle Store. Tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley and Sons, Elsevier and Taylor and Francis. Here is more info:

Kindle Textbook Rental offers the ability to customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days, so students only pay for the specific amount of time they need a book. Students can also easily extend any rental period in increments as small as one day or choose to purchase the book they are renting at any time.

With the Kindle Textbook Rental students can use Amazon's Whispersync technology to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere - even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them via Whispersync.

Kindle Textbooks are "Rent Once, Read Everywhere" as they can be read across the most popular devices with free Kindle Reading Apps for PC, Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android-based devices.